The taus announces itself before a note is played: the resonator is a peacock, carved, painted, sometimes fitted with a real feather plume at the neck. Tāūs is the Persian word for peacock. Under the sculpture it is a large fretted, bowed instrument with sympathetic strings, and its deep, sustained tone made it a core voice of Gurmat Sangeet, the Sikh devotional music tradition.
That paragraph is a model for how every contested attribution on this site is meant to read — which is one reason the taus is here. The other reason is the sound, which nothing else in the gallery approaches for sheer depth.
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Sources & a note on images and audio
- Reference material on Punjabi and Sikh musical instruments, including — where relevant above — the explicit scholarly notes on contested attributions. Instrument-origin claims are labelled with their confidence throughout.
This page ships without photography and without audio, deliberately: Punjabia uses only real, licensed images (never generated ones) and only its own or verified openly-licensed recordings (never re-hosted commercial audio). Both are being arranged; the written sound-description above is permanent and is also there for readers who cannot hear the clip.